In other words, to furnish a State grounds to declare void a marriage celebrated in another State where it is valid, the parties must intend not only to evade the law but also not to gain a bona fide residence in the State to which they go.
Efforts have been made to prohibit intermarriage in the District of Columbia. At the last session of the Sixtieth Congress, Senator Milton, of Florida, introduced a bill to make intermarriage between white persons and Negroes a crime punishable by imprisonment for ten years and a fine of one thousand dollars, providing that one with one-eighth or more Negro blood should come within the prohibition, declaring such marriages to be null and void and the issue resulting from them illegitimate and so incapable of inheritance. This bill apparently died in the committee room. A resolution in the Senate to recall it from the Committee on the Judiciary was tabled on March 1, 1909, by a vote of 43 to 21.
INTERMARRIAGE AND THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION
The constitutionality of State statutes and judicial decisions which have refused to recognize marriages between Negroes and white persons celebrated in other States or in the District of Columbia have been attacked on two grounds: First, that they are in violation of article one, section ten, of the Constitution of the United States, which says, in part, that no State shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts; and, secondly, that they contravene that part of the Fourteenth Amendment which says that no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge
